


Sephiroth Week 2019

by OneThousandCuts



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Canon-Typical Mindfuckery, Moderate Violence, Multi, Seph/Tifa implications in 'Her'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22824265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OneThousandCuts/pseuds/OneThousandCuts
Summary: Ficlets written for Sephiroth Week 2019.
Comments: 28
Kudos: 19





	1. Prompt: Innocence; Title: Consequences

Professor Hojo calls him a masterpiece. Professor Gast tells him he’s brilliant and says never to doubt his value as a person. Sephiroth is not sure what Gast means by that, but they both tell him he is different-special-and he believes them. Gast tells him to use it well, but his murmurs afterward don’t escape Sephiroth’s ears. He puzzles at his words: How does one steal a childhood? He is nine now, and he has been eight, seven, and so on– he will live and grow through these years just as any other being born into the world. He will not wake up having missed this part of his life, he is sure. How could someone steal years?

Most recently, Hojo and Gast argue over whether continuing to hire tutors or sending him to boarding school is best. Hojo still wants the tutor. “Time absent is data wasted,” he says. Gast goes on and on about proper socialization. (Sephiroth decides he will learn that last word soon.) Gast hates how often Hojo has instructed the Turks to handle tutors who have seen things not for their eyes. The turnover and toll are not sustainable, he says. (Sustainable: another word.) The job is getting harder to fill each quarter. Sending him to school, away from the rest of SRD’s secrets, makes much more sense.

Sephiroth hopes Professor Gast might win this argument, although Hojo never plays fair. He is curious about others his age. He wants to see those differences he’s been told about so many times for himself. He wants to know if he can find anyone who’s the same, at least a little bit. Does this not also count as gathering data? He hopes that Hojo will think of this. He wonders if he offers to report his own results in, going away to school would be more acceptable, but he thinks twice about that. Hojo is not fond of taking others’ suggestions unless he can pretend the ideas were his own. Still, the idea of being around another person his size and asking them many questions fills him with a strange excitement–but also a sadness he doesn’t understand. He’s different and special. He is valuable. What does he have to be sad about? He’s also a little afraid, but he doesn’t say so and pushes the feeling away. Hojo does not react to fright, sadness, or sickness well. They too are time wasted, and there are consequences.

All children learn about consequences. This is normal. Many voices–Hojo, Gast, the tutors who come and go, the lab technicians, and his other trainers–have made him aware of this. So there is at least one way he is the same as the others, Sephiroth thinks. He decides that maybe Professor Gast is unwell; in need of rest. He is surely still a child, because he faces consequences like all children.

One cannot steal a childhood. 


	2. Prompt: Wish; Title: Upon a Star

Psyche in ruins and his directive complete, the puppet’s hand retracted.

The Black Materia gravitated toward Sephiroth at long last, as if knowing he’d always been the one meant to receive it. His mind touched and coaxed the consciousness therein, granting it his strength and his command. He held his eyes shut still, basking in the materia’s aura, awakening as it awakened, alive and complete once more. Reaching outside his shell, he yo-yoed the puppet–that empty husk of a cadet who’d dared to impede him five years prior–before his allies, mocking them; showing them the strings they’d so adamantly refused to see beforehand. Some of their shocked faces he recognized from long ago; some he’d once longed to dispatch personally, but it mattered no more. Fleeing this place wouldn’t save their lives for long.

The ground trembled, and the branches holding his cocoon aloft splintered and collapsed. The crater walls blinked and growled, and the planet’s worthless flailing–its last Weapons–gave chase after the humans. He descended deeper, deeper into the cave. A blinding surge of spirit energy rushed up to meet him as he went, the toll the Black Materia required to complete its task.

Its power coalesced around him, instantly depositing him into an indeterminate, empty place in the cosmos. There were no planets nearby or signs of life; only a cold, distant sun and an endless asteroid field that obscured its faint light as it orbited him. The tumbling space debris displayed to him their shapes, sizes, and composition. Sephiroth understood: He was to choose the one to become Meteor, the falling star that would deliver him the life of the planet. A multitude of smaller ones drifted by, suitable had he only intended a temporal punishment for humanity, but they were beyond that. That which those traitors had hoarded for a few of their number belonged to him alone now. He spotted others– reeling foothills and awkward city blocks–that could conceivably devastate much of the planet’s life, but would not guarantee its end. He required certainty.

Finally, a singular, gargantuan mountain hovered before him, a rotund monument he’d momentarily taken for a small moon. He drew near and grazed it gingerly with the tips of his fingers.

This was the one…this one.

Time and space contracted in response, expelling him back into the cave. The Lifestream continued to rush upward, no longer merely responding to the materia’s beckon, but to the blind panic of a planet sensing mortal danger on every side. Something else stirred below as well–the only power that could counter what he’d just wrought–a delayed, last-ditch answer to a dead prayer. He lifted a hand, sealing the locus of Holy’s movement and the crater’s mouth overhead with a barrier. Only he and the Lifestream lingered between the two.

Sephiroth levitated slowly into the churning flow, arms outstretched to catch the world’s disjointed thoughts and claim the petulant dead who refused join with it. Those ones melded with him nigh willingly, unable to distinguish between his will and theirs; specks bearing delusions of grandeur that mistook his power for their own purpose. A sensation nearing contentment settled in his chest. All that remained was to bide his time. He pictured the killing impact. He imagined the planet’s cries in that moment, no longer fighting his presence, but pleading to join with him for its salvation. Submitting to his rule.

And he would grant its wish; all things would begin anew through him. 


	3. Prompt: Fate; Title: Mother

“Professor Gast…Why didn’t you tell me anything? …Why did you die?”

Sephiroth turned his head to the ceiling, to the cobwebs and the dusty nothing that hung there, hoping the reasons might dawn on him. No one answered; only that which he already knew resounded within him. They never had, or if they did it had been naught but lies, evasions, and contemptible willful ignorance. What he was, who he was, and a purpose outside of whatever Shinra demanded of him–there was nothing for it but these impersonal, hand-scrawled logs; the whole of his existence spelled out and boiled down for him in cold technical jargon, mathematical formulae, and diagrams of Jenova’s cell structure.

Jenova. His mother, and the only spark of intrinsic value amongst all of it. A Cetra, according to most of the texts he’d read thus far–a powerful Ancient with a destiny bound to the planet’s life itself. She was not human, and consequently, neither was he…

His eyes burned, and he let the volume hanging from his hand fall to the floor. Force of habit compelled him to blink and swallow hard. Slowly, he leveled his head and turned his sights back to the bookshelf. He reached for the next numbered journal, but hesitated. Wedged between it and the next one was a title that didn’t belong. A small tab inserted into a clear pocket along the spine read, “ _Omega_ ” in a neat, blue-penned script.

Curiosity permitted the incessant pounding in his chest to slow somewhat as he selected that one instead. He opened its worn leather cover, spotting the initials “LC” in the same hand on its inside–he’d encountered them a few times in the other works as well. According to one journal, they’d died in a nondescript lab accident, but their observations were on par with Gast’s. A full name eluded him, but he’d gathered that this scientist had played a significant role in the Jenova Project.

The project that had created him

_Created_. Not birthed, but constructed of carefully selected elements to Shinra’s liking; made to be an overwrought vessel into which they could fit any of their meaningless designs. That was what he had been. That life–fighting for insignificant aims not his own–was over. The burning returned. His throat constricted. He choked it back down in a pretense of duty, issuing himself orders to continue down here until he found the truth in its entirety. Until he understood his own nature.

There was still Jenova. There was still…mother. But what was he to do with that knowledge?

He scanned a few pages and paced back to the desk. LC tended to focus on Cetra legends and their basis in reality–they could teach him more about his mother. What she and her kind–his kind–believed. What gave her life meaning. What it was worth. At the least, a task to which he could dedicate himself. Somewhere certain to go after abdicating his gilded prison with Shinra.

“Part of a system created to preserve the constant circulation of life…to act as the ark which guides all life to the boundless sea of stars…” Sephiroth read to himself and slammed the book shut.

His breath came up short.

Was it…?

The Cetra were an itinerant race, he’d earlier found.

Was Omega–which required the end of the planet as it was to manifest–their way to the Promised Land?

Their journey, this world, all long overdue….

His hands balled into tight fists and his insides quaked violently. The truth finally and suddenly fell into sharp, infuriating relief. Everything fit together now, plain as day. One betrayal upon another–Shinra and every human he’d ever known had used him and would no doubt sacrifice him to their own ends if it suited them, just as humanity had sacrificed the Cetra in the past. To steal away the Promised Land. To steal away their purpose for petty convenience. Because that’s what humans did. His whole being testified to it: They took what was not theirs–the very substance of life–and ruined it. Stagnated it. For too long they’d obfuscated his own destiny as well, but these traitors would not take another inch. He would avenge himself, the Cetra’s demise, his mother’s desecration (though it created him).

And it was not by chance that the humans had created him, one last being with Ancient blood; he was fated to become their nemesis; their judge. The Lifestream and its inevitable journey to the stars were his rightful inheritance.

He knew what he had to do.

He was the Chosen One.


	4. Prompt: Free Day/ Limit Break; Title: Supernova

He had done enough. That’s what they told him. But…was he not in Wutai to win the war? Yet, they were still fighting. It was far from over. He’d decimated their numbers at Da-Chao, but the enemy wasn’t interested in surrender.

“Why am I no longer required?” he asked.

The old commander seated before him removed his glasses and made a show of cleaning them, head bowed. “Sephiroth, it’s not that your skills are no longer needed, it's…How do I put this? What we were ready to call the ‘Battle for Da-Chao’ is now being quietly termed among our own ranks as the 'Da-Chao Incident’. Strange way to talk about a victory, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes…” Sephiroth conceded. “It’s what I’d expect had our side sustained heavy casualties.”

“To put it lightly, the men are terrified of what they saw. Most of them can hardly be asked to describe it cogently.” He steepled his fingers for a moment and grunted. “But before I ship you to back to HQ, I want to hear it from you. What happened out there? What did you do–or what the hell did you think you were doing?”

“The others seemed to lack the morale for a prolonged guerrilla encounter,” he started, crossing his arms. “It was…an improvised technique I constructed to end the battle efficiently.” To make the screaming stop. Especially the younger cadets. Their shrill terror reminded him of something he’d heard in Hojo’s labs when he was still small. Listening to them felt like claws raking into the back of his head. The present danger _was_ real enough so he–

“Improvised? If the hysterics are to be believed, you tore a hole in reality and blew up a sun.”

“An illusion, meant to intimidate.”

“Well, sure. The sun is still shining, we’re still standing on terra firma, but half of your damned platoon is being discharged on medical leave because they’re afraid to look at the sky. You on the other hand–if Heidegger has his way, you’ll be back here in a week.”

Sephiroth released an exasperated sigh. This was something the ground leadership here could not comprehend. Once Hojo got wind that he’d performed an as-yet unobserved ability, it would be more than a week. He’d managed to turn delaying and refusing orders to check in with the SRD into a skill unto itself by playing his time to Heidegger’s favor, but this was too much. Once the reports were on his desk, the President’s curiosity would surely fall to Hojo this time, and Shinra would not be refused.

He recalled his first deployment, a few years back. How he’d outperformed the parameters set in the simulation, and still wound up under Hojo’s eye for the better part of a month. Though harrowing, those first real battles had honed the skill of departing his mind while his sword worked as required to an equally sharp point, but he was unable to access that same state in the lab. He was fully on alert, always, through long-isolated hours for every echoed murmur and footstep down the sterile white halls, for the click and slam of every door, for every interrogating word, every needle-prick.

“Permission to strike the 'Da-Chao Incident’ from the record,” he requested then. A long shot.

The grizzled soldier rose from his seat, cracked his neck, and paced for a moment with his hands behind his back. “Hmph. So, it’s going to get you in hot water, too? I have to report something, but a simpler version of things would sure help with the paperwork. What else could whip a couple hundred promising infantrymen into instant crack-pots?”

“While searching for enemy forces, we were exposed to an unknown nerve agent in the caves,” Sephiroth offered. “Wutai added the agent to the natural fires there to stymie our efforts, but the situation got out of hand…”

“We suspect that their delivery apparatus malfunctioned, and they suffered the greater losses, but our guys got it bad too. Right. The execs will buy it. Heidegger or the Turks might blink, but I think I can manage them. A victory’s a victory. But Sephiroth?"

“Sir?”

“Unless you’re betting your life on it, I’d keep that sun-bursting bullshit to yourself. Rumor is that more than just the opposition have started calling you 'demon’." 


	5. Prompt: Shapeshifter; Title: Her

Her mind repels his touch. She’s much stronger than Cloud, too much for the trace of his mother’s cells–imbibed from Nibelheim’s water supply long ago–running through her veins to give her over to his will. He cannot compel her to turn back and bring those Cloud had entrusted with the Black Materia on her own.

But he is not completely bereft of a link to her consciousness, to draw upon that which is in her, to mimic and channel her as he pleases: Tifa’s memories, voice, mannerisms, insecurities–her very image.

Provoking the whirling spirit energies into a blackened frenzy, he shifts the Jenova-body he’d been using in lieu of his own into her mirror. He clenches her gloved fists as he would his own–copies of the hands that had once wielded his own weapon against him. Hands from which he’d had to pry it with more force than a meager pluck. He remembers her, enraged and struggling before he’d cut her. Her wrath against his betrayal in exchange for his against that of humanity. Once, he’d counted hers just another body, but she’d survived him and she’d killed for it.

Now, he sees her. She burns inside, and it’s all the more fitting that she’ll seem to be the one to draw those holding the materia to him.

Fragments of her filter in while he rushes her form into the ripping winds to pursue her compatriots. Though lithe to the eye, he feels the measure of her strength, her will. Even the mere shape of her fights him, sensing his misuse from afar. The body wavers, growing, shrinking, expanding, and contracting from his being to hers. Nonetheless, as before, he wrests control.

He greets Barret as the friend he thinks he knows. (Sephiroth wonders if he–if any of them–know how she tires of this world; what he’s seen in her heart.) Cloud’s in trouble, he says.

Unquestioning, faithful, the man runs off.

“…hee hee hee…and remember…the Black Materia!” Sephiroth sneers once he’s out of earshot.

Tifa’s shape revolts in force then. Her thoughts, the heartbeat from her real body thrumming in his ears, her fear, the confusion he’d earlier induced, and the stalwart resolve lurking beneath it floods out from him. The borrowed shell returns to his likeness and fades, used up.

Returned to his still-cocooned self, he stirs, disoriented from her pull against him. Beneath him, the puppet hesitates. He holds his head and hugs himself. Second thoughts–illusions of a choice seep into Cloud’s mind. He scrapes his feet in his slow march to Barret, stalling.

Sephiroth pulls the mental strings–the ones that had nearly slipped from his grasp because of _her_ –taut: “ _Come on. The Black Materia…_ ”

She calls for Cloud; she begs for him to stop. He can’t impress upon her what to say or do, so he commands the puppet’s ears against her voice. It does not exist. It will not reach him. He will comply.

But her–he will remember her. To what end, he has yet to decide. Perhaps he will claim her soul last, so that she can witness the end with her own eyes.


	6. Prompt: Darkness; Title: Reasons

Over the edge he plummets, past the walls, between the pipes. Headfirst into the reactor’s bottom, mother’s head clutched tight, the molten pool takes him. A guttural moan reverberates through the darkness. A sad hum answers it.

The world does not embrace and greet him; it does not speak to him as one of its own, but there are whispers. Rumors. There is fear. His body melts away, stripped down to disembodied spirit energy. He drifts, self-contained, listening, pushing back the fury of his defeat. Against thinking of that speck of a cadet who’d used his own impaled torso to throw him off the bridge. Seething, he does not think of him. He refuses the impossible, that he’d been destroyed by the likes of such a person.

The planet’s cries forfeit its secrets as he sinks, bemoaning its wounds, protesting the near presence of the one who’d injured it. Mother–he understands now. Shinra’s records were mistaken. She’d journeyed a long way from this place, wandering the cosmos until she found a world that might suit her. But she was deadly to them–to the Cetra, which neither she nor he were.

He searches the mumbled voices, the deranged melancholy notes; he interrogates the fragmented spirits for more answers.

This planet is weak. At his demand, it betrays its deep history in glimmering illusions. Had the Cetra not impeded mother, she would have merged with the planet, becoming all in all. Broken and isolated for thousands of years, it might take millennia more to recoup the strength needed to complete those plans. Racing her, it heals the wound; preparing Weapons for the day of her restoration.

Deeper still he submerges himself, willing his being into the world’s core. He waits and listens, compelling the Ancients’ souls, barely conscious of who they once were, to deliver him their knowledge and wisdom. Drifting for eons in this flow has rendered them long abandoned storytellers, overdue for anyone who will hear them. They gather to him like eager kids, discerning only a curious listener. And that he is–he will hear them to very last, until his understanding has surpassed theirs.

Something in the stream scratches at his essence while he absorbs their tales, urging its diffusion, but he is a stone in the flow. It can neither dissolve nor break him. He will stay here. Already he knows that he can reconstruct himself, a gift he has inherited from mother. He chooses her crash site as the place for his Reunion. His beckon circles the globe, that all with mother’s cells should gather there. Some go mad; some itch with wanderlust; others seek new work a little further north from where they’d lived before. Some think they’re only following friends. Each one a puppet with its own little reason, veiling the call in false purpose.

He senses that the one who’d sent him here is among them. The time is not yet, but he decides he will use him to complete his plan; ruin him to the utmost for what he has done. And then, he will cease, along with all else…

And what meaning is there, what point can there be, in a life that ends and melts away into nothing but this ever re-inventing stream? Whoever that life had been, whatever they might have accomplished–all are annihilated in the planet’s cycle of rebirth. Anyone who remembers them are also subject to it. Time obliterates even memory from remembering.

The reasons of a temporal life, no matter how cherished, are nothing.

Sephiroth detests the planet’s life cycle. He won’t simply submit and fade to nothing and no one like the rest. Such a fate is beneath him. His purpose as he’d first determined holds true, Cetra or no: This world is destined for his rule; his hold over every soul, and mother’s designs will give it to him.

He will retain himself forevermore.


	7. Prompt: Remake; Title: Reborn

Those who fought him bowed the knee and collapsed, consumed in his supernova sun.

His Meteor fell, whole and unimpeded.

Under his guidance, it crushed the circumference of the crater and obliterated the Northern Continent. It plowed through the planet’s miles-deep armor, ejecting mountainous shards into outer space. Holy released, sputtered, and fell back into itself, a false salvation unseen and never to be known, pulling the giant rock deeper into the planet’s core.

Hysteric tendrils of Lifestream swarmed in from every crevice, every hideaway.

Sephiroth caught and imbued them with his will, and they called to the rest, drawing the life from every beating heart to him.

All things were possessed of him. Birds fell from the sky mid-flight to give up their energy. Belly-up floating fish and whales dotted the rivers and oceans. Deer, wolves, and even makonoids keeled over. Trees, grasses, and all flora instantly withered, draining away.

Mako reactors went into emergency shut-down, suddenly deprived of their fuel. Men and women busy at work, pretending their existence would carry on, fell over and slept. Their children, tucked safely into in their beds at home, quietly forgot how to breathe. 

The planet rallied every ounce of strength it had, every spare spark of life, and everything it couldn’t spare, until the land and the seas lay dead silent. The earth cracked, dry and desolate. Dust and ash blotted out the sun.

The shell of the world trembled. Green light streaks poked out from deep fissures–a minuscule, final and futile struggle–only for him to pull it back down.

Far beneath the surface, the man he was ceased to be, while he yet remained. Confused, the deluge of life-blood converged upon him; it filled him up until the winged monstrosity he’d first elected to be unfurled, complete. He stretched his legs, and spread his six, broad white and gradated wings behind him. Two more crimson-violet, chitinous, and unbending protrusions–a mark of his heritage–overshadowed his shoulders. Hailing his ascension, wheels within wheels of light self-constructed and spun around him, and his two grand halos separated to hover behind him.

The last wisps of spirit energy fled into him, and Sephiroth opened his eyes. The carcass of the world that had been fled away, drifting apart to leave only him, a single, brilliant new star in the depths of the cosmos. He could perceive everything–he could feel it. Nothing was beyond his reach, beyond his changing or his knowing. Nevermore would there be a truth hidden from him.

Reborn, he was one with the planet, once and for all–a god to rule over every soul.


End file.
